EMIYA Shirou's Self-Centered Holy Grail War
Prelude Notes:
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Enjoy...
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Chapter 5 - Introspection (Self-Reflection)
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The next morning, EMIYA awoke Shirou rudely, abruptly throwing him out into the yard.
"Wha?! Hey! What was that for, Archer?!"
"You guard's down, Master." Archer commented, sarcastically, "You could've easily been killed in your sleep."
"Well, it can't be helped can it?" Shirou asked, indignantly, "I just caught up in this whole war yesterday! I don't even know why we're fighting with other people or what the purpose of this whole war is, in the first place."
Archer just sighed. Right, that was another thing he would have to explain to his younger self as long as they remained in the war. Well, whatever. That could wait until after he crushed this Emiya's Shirou's ideals.
"Well, it's no matter." Archer said. "Nevermind that. More importantly, we have something we need to discuss. Of urgent importance."
Shirou looked skeptical, still grumpy from Archer's abrupt awakening.
"It's about being your extremely stupid idea of being a hero, or rather, an "Ally of Justice"."
Now those words caught Shirou's attention.
"What do you mean?"
EMIYA ignored his question.
"It'll be important, so pay attention."
And all of a sudden, Archer's face turned serious, his expression no longer stoic and slightly sarcastic.
"Watch closely, and feel the essence of your own foolish mistakes."
"Huh...?
Pushing his hand outwards, Archer began chanting.
"I am the bone of my sword."
Shirou felt a chill run down his body. Not a pleasant chill, but a deeply as an ominous one, one which made Shirou's blood run cold.
The words felt somehow familar to him, despite the fact that Shirou had never heard them before.
But they resonated him deeply, was someone who's body was also made of swords.
"Iron is my blood, and Steel is my body."
Shirou grew somehow entranced with Archer's words, as he continued, like he could see into some part of Archer's hear or psyche.
Both of them were the same, in some sense - the bodies, their ideals, and their willpower were unbending, made of steel. But their hearts were fragile then they knew, a heart of glass.
"I have created over a thousand blades."
Just how many battle fields had he seen? How many battlefields had he been through? How many battlefields had he overcome?
At some point, he had bloodied his hands with so many innocent victims' blood that he had last count.
"Unknown to Life,"
He was pain was never once understood by anybody, nor would anybody ever be grateful for what he had to go through, for the sake of Humanity. But, he was fine with that.
"Nor Known to Death."
He was never once allowed to retreat, never once allowed to rest. For his duty concerned the whole of mankind.
A duty too important to neglect, but a burden of suffering far too heavy for any one man to ever carry. A burden nobody should ever have to suffer through. Death would be only all too simple, all too quick of a release. One he desperately longed for, but one which would be forever denied to him, as one not allowed to die.
"Have withstood pain to create many blades."
He was always the only survivor, the only that could stand victorious atop that lonely hill of corpses and mangled bodies. Victory was his only consolation, yet no matter how much he "won" through those pyrrhic victories, there was never any joy to be found it - he could stand there, drunk on his own sorrow and guilt and regret.
"Yet these hands will never hold anything,"
He was no longer worthy to be comforted, or to live a life a peace. Not with everything he had done. Not to feel the smiling face of his younger sister, nor to know a warm lover's embrace, nor to know the warmth of a family.
His friends and everybody else he once knew, long since abandoned in his pursuit of a pointless, unreachable ideal.
So, as I pray,
An empty prayer, without hope or faith.
A completely meaningless life and afterlife, filled with nothing but pointless victories and lifeless victims.
"Unlimited Blade Works"
Truly, his body, his whole ideal...
...was made of nothing but blades.
...
The next thing Shirou, he was in a barren wasteland, filled with nothing but swords.
In the rust-colored sky, gigantic gears turned slowly and continuously without rest, as though they too, could not stop their fate. Mere cogs that could only serve there purpose in producing more blades to use, amidst this miniature microcosm of a World.
Shirou was left speechless.
He didn't know what Archer meant by bringing him here, but somehow, he had a vague idea of what Archer wanted, just from the things he seen and felt from the words Archer had spoken to cast his spell.
"You..." Shirou hesitated, unsure of himself, "Are you...?"
It would be ridiculous and unbelievable if that was the case, but one the glimpses he had caught was of a younger Archer, one that looked just like...
But no, that couldn't be!
Kiritsugu had once told him once, when he asked, that even for the standards of Magecraft, Time Travel was something was considered ridiculous and impossible to achieve.
Archer could see the confusion on Shirou's face, and answer.
"Well, just listen for now." Archer said, "This is important, after all."
And so, Archer started telling his story.
The story of a boy who broke under his own false ideals.
"Once, there was a boy who wanted to be a hero." Archer started, his voice laced with distain.
"He wanted to save anybody, and everybody, that he could, without any regard for himself."
Shirou winced, as Archer's words and his glare seemed to focus directly on him.
"And so, when the chance came," Archer continued, "To save the Greatest number of people he could, he made a contract with the World."
"Normally a contract with the World would entail some benefit or wish being granted in exchange for their eternal servitude." Archer explained, "But for this boy, that power and the opportunity to save people was the reward in and of itself."
Archer's tone became harsher as he continued, "Or so he had thought."
"But what he didn't realize was just what exactly that meant. Or what exactly it meant to "save the greatest number of people, at all costs"."
Suddenly, Archer traced out his elegant black and white shortswords, and tossed them over to Shirou, which Shirou promptly caught.
"And never once did he reflect on what it truly means to "save everyone, regardless of friend or foe"".
And all of a sudden, Archer lunged right at him! Shirou barely managed to raise his guard in time as Archer's new pair of his shortswords clashed violently with the pair Shirou had defended himself with.
And all of a sudden, memories and experience of Archer's time fulfilling his role came rushing in.
Killing one to save two.
Killing two to save tens.
Killing tens to save hundreds.
Killing hundreds to save thousands.
Killing thousands to save hundreds of thousands.
Killing hundreds of thousands to save millions and billions.
Killing, killing, killing, over and over, and over, and over, and over.
Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Killing the innocent to save innocent to save the evil, killing the good to save the guilty.
Shirou almost kneeled over and vomited from the intense and overwhelming rush of memories that came flooding in to him. They each only lasted a short while, but it all felt like it lasted for an eternity, and each felt as though he himself were the one who experienced these memories.
The first few times he had been assigned to so, he resisted as much as he could, but to no avail.
It the end, the World was absolute over mere humans and contractors, after all. There was no way to resist, despite his best efforts.
He hated it, and he absolutely despised his duty with all his heart, But even so, he had no choice but to continued acting as a Guardian, as a "Cleaner".
And little by little, over the course of the next few years, the next few decades or so, he gradually grew accustomed to doing so. It sickened him, but he couldn't but become desensitized to it all, as he lost more and more of himself in his work.
By 100 years in, he still liked think that maybe he was making some small positive change to somebody, to anybody's life. But he knew, deep down, this he was mostly just deluding himself. What he was doing would save mankind several times over, but it would only save "mankind". Nobody would be made any happier for it, since "mankind's survival" was only a given as a natural part of it's existence, no matter how people had to die to ensure it.
It was only by 1000 years in or so that he started to realize that he could now barely even recall the faces or names of the people close to him during his lifetime.
And it was at that point that he started to realized the foolishness of his own endeavors, and the foolishness of humanity. How what he was doing barely even made a dent in their mistakes, and how mankind would keep on endless repeating the same mistakes and the same same tragedies over and over again, no matter how much he continued to clean up after their mistakes.
Surely, any ordinary person would realized something so obvious within their first few years, or at least within their first decade or so. And even for the abnormally stubborn, they would've realized that much sooner, within their first few decades or century or so.
But EMIYA Shirou was absurdly stubborn, to an incredible degree. And even if he knew it to be true deep down, it still took him that long to stop denying what he already knew to be true, and admit to the full truth.
And it was as he realized that, that it first started to all seem so pointless.
But even so, he continued on.
Hoping, dreaming, believing in vain that he would make some difference. That something, somewhere, eventually would give and crack and change little by little.
That mankind would at some point start to realize the foolishness of their errors and prevent such tragedies from occurring again, at least by a little.
But never did his workload lighten, even by a slightest bit. If anything, the more mankind prosper, the more he had to clean up after them.
But even so, he pushed onwards, and onwards, and onwards, continuing to do the same thing over and over again, all blurred together.
At some point, he had lost track of the number of years it had been since he had first started, counting up to at least 10,000, but probably even more than that.
And that was how long it took him to realized that just stubbornly trying to do the same thing over and over again wouldn't work, and that he couldn't even remember anybody's face or name at all, struggling even to recall his old man's face and name.
Only his incredibly vague impression of Saber still remained, burned into his soul as it was, as a blurry recollection. But now, he couldn't even recall; her name or face or voice at all, either. There was no affection left in the memory any memory. Only the faintest impression of her eyes, that stared so deeply into his soul back then, remained.
It was then that he realized that this would keep on going forever, without end.
He would be doomed forever, to continuously saving the many by killing the "few", all in a pointless cycle that would never, ever end,
Nobody would ever truly be saved then, and nobody would ever learned from the mistakes they couldn't even remember.
His task, his obligation, his duty, his suffering, would never end.
There was no point, no end, and no salvation.
And he couldn't even resist, controlled as the puppet he was. No, as the puppet he had long since sold himself into being!
And for the first in a few thousand years,
He laughed.
At just how damn foolish he'd been.
And that was the first he's ever truly lost hope in anything, and learned what true despair felt like.
That was when EMIYA Shirou had finally cracked, long before The World ever did.
He broke down, and just laughed, laughing lifelessly, hopelessly at the deeply bitter and cruel irony of it all, despite his tears.
But he continued, no longer keeping track of years after that, everything blurred together even more than they already had.
And he swore to himself...
If the chance ever came, he would kill his younger self, to end both their suffering. And if that didn't end his own existence (he knew somewhere deep down that it probably wouldn't, no matter what faint hopes of it he still clung to), at least it would be a mercy to his younger self to never have to suffer through the same things he did.
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Shirou felt nauseous. He covered his mouth, trying not to vomit from the sheer influx of despair and negativity that were piling on to him, ceaselessly, unendingly.
Archer looked down at him, condescendingly, though with perhaps the faintest glimmer of pity in his eyes.
"You save want to save other," Archer said, "But saving others is just your excuse, nothing but a flimsy bandage for your guilt at survivor at the cost of other people's lives. It's nothing but an empty and meaningless excuse, a set of false ideals you inherited clinging on to the dreams of a dying man."
"No, that's...!" Shirou tried to find some answer, some way to reject what Archer was telling him.
"You can't find your own happiness in only saving others."
"And you can't find your own meaning in blindly trying to save others, even those who don't want to be saved in the first place."
"Just how many times you will have to be betrayed, how many times will you have to broken? Before you can start even this simple fact?! Emiya Shirou!"
"No, that's...!" Shirou tried to find some answer as he he rose up from the ground, looking for some way to resist and reject what Archer was telling him.
He wanted to defend his dream, no matter what it took.
And so, he looked, into his own heart, for the answer.
"Maybe so. Maybe they are just false ideals, inherited from my old man!" Shirou admitted, "But even so, they're beautiful ideals, worth chasing after! And if I can make anybody, even just one person, happier by doing so just like Kiritsugu did by saving me, then what's so wrong about that?!"
"Hmph." Archer scoffed, "I'll acknowledge that it is a beautiful dream."
"But," He continued rebukes, "What use is it in being beautiful, when it leads nobody to ever truly becoming any happier? When it deludes you into falling into an empty pit so deep and dark that can't even save yourself? When it becomes nothing more than burden that only leads you to break under its weight?! Something like that is no longer a dream, but nothing more than a self-indulgent fantasy!"
"Ngh!" Shirou grunted in pain, as though Archer was piercing through the defense of Emiya Shirou's heart with more experienced blades and (s)words than he had ever known.
"So what...?!" Shirou asked, "Maybe you are right! But then so what?! What else am I supposed to do? What else am I supposed to live for, if I can't even save some else?!"
Shirou swallowed, forced the rest of the painful words (the words he never wanted to admit to) out of his heart,
"Why else did I survive that day?! Why else was I saved that day, if not to save others?!"
Archer didn't have the answer to that, either.
After all, rather than searching for an answer, he only done what Emiya Shirou and Emiya Kiritsugu had know to do.
Kill the few to save the many.
And the answer to his own existence that he found, was simply to end it all.
He didn't have any other answers beyond that.
No, rather, at some point in the past, in his weariness, he had just stopped looking for other answers all together, stubbornly refusing to admit that he had gone down the wrong path at some point.
And even now, he was exhausted and sick and tired of it all, that he didn't want to look for another answer.
"I don't know." He admitted.
But even so, there was one thing that he still wanted to say, before anything else.
"But, at the very least!" Archer expressed, voice full of passion and regrets, "Even then! Even so! Before you try to save anyone else, at least save yourself first! Emiya Shirou!"
And for the longest time in thousands of years, Archer actually found his own face scrunching up, and tears welling up on the edges of his eyes.
Shirou, at this point, was on the verge of tears, too.
Archer turned way, and wiped them off. He clicked his tongue at himself, what unwitting show of weakness.
"At the very least," He repeated, "Save yourself first, Emiya Shirou..."
And this time, it sounded less like a order or command, but much softer, almost like a desperate plea...
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Chapter 5 - Introspection (Self-Reflection)
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Author's Notes:
If you ask me, all they need is a lovin' injection of Artoria (or Rin or Sakura or Ilya) straight into their souls, and everything would work out just fine.
Or rather, maybe a lovingly delivered physical injection straight into Artoria (or Rin or Sakura) would work, as well. If you get my meaning lmao.
I would say about 300 cubic centimeters or so would work
(lmao if you get that reference)
Trust me, it worked for Holy Shirou War's Saber, didn't it? (getting some Artoria into his soul, and shooting about 300ccs of himself into Artoria lmao)
I mean, hey, it may sound cliche, but even Berserker in canon (Heaven's Feel Shirou) was cured of his hardheaded idealism because of it, ain't it? (And likewise, Assassin, the "Ally of Justice" Heaven's Feel Shirou was damned because of his lack of it.)
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So, under a different context, when Shirou is fighting for his life, and when Archer is more uncertain of himself after bonding with Rin (and still slightly worried about her, despite wanting to end his own existence), that line about Kiritsugu's dream being beautiful, even if it is pointless to chase after it, might've worked. Especially since Archer himself is still having some doubts about what he's doing, and because he had forgotten all about that.
But under this context, where's he's more resolved to kill his younger self, and without it being in the context of it being a duel between them, where Shirou isn't hopped up on adrenaline or his own conviction, it's not nearly as easy to convince Archer of his own point of view.
The change in context makes a significant difference, basically. There's still more after this, by the way. But this was basically the first arc's climax. Next chapter will be the fall-out and such. Yeah, so look forward to that!